River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (13 page)

The Allegheny River, for the bulk of its length, has never been classed as “an excellent waterway of commerce.” This is not surprising when you examine the very nature of the stream—for it is a river which is likely to be frozen solid from December until March, with ice piled in great packs and jams at perhaps thirty localities—piled mountain high with great ice blocks thrown into the most jagged contortions by reason of the grinding pressure brought to bear; then comes the annual “spring thaw" in which the Allegheny rids itself of the frozen constipation in one vast bowel movement which is a frightening spectacle to behold—urged by an enema of melting snow and drizzling rains which rile all the creeks to flood tide and cause a never-ending roar from each gully and ravine. The river stirs uneasily at first, winces, then with no warning whatever delivers itself of ice, drift, flotsam and jetsam, trees, logs, houses, barns, haystacks, cornshocks, barrels, dead pigs, bloated horses, boxes, barrels, packing crates, and other impedimenta which it has warehoused during the winter—all of the hodge-podge starts moving to the tune of thunderous cannonading of ice jams breaking, and one jam swoops down upon another, and with a continued crashing and rending the mighty discharge is on its way, now taking out bridges, piers, sometimes whole villages, with the natives of the bottom lands fleeing for the hills and terrified livestock jumping fences and racing away for Egypt or anywhere, so as to be shed of this cataclysm. “The Allegheny’s bust loose!” This cry is passed from mouth to mouth, and hurries over telegraph wires, and shortly every owner of floating property the entire length of the Ohio River, some 1,000 miles long, is suddenly busy getting his houseboat, or raft, or steamboat, or fleet of barges out of the road of this demon destruction. For oftentimes the full force of this upheaval runs at brim tide for several days, and the broad Ohio proves a meager plumbing system to handle this cosmic diarrhetic discharge. Not until the Mississippi is reached does the destruction cease, and sometimes not even then—for case-hardened blocks of Allegheny ice have serenely sailed by New Orleans at intervals.

Frederick Way, Jr.

The Allegheny
, 1942

T
HE MORNING
came on sour with a sky working itself into a rain, the sort of weather a cynic would expect now that we had to leave
Nikawa
and take to our canoe for a couple of days. We got oilskins ready when we went to the Allegheny just above the mouth of Brokenstraw Creek, six miles downstream from the courthouse town of Warren. I had failed, weeks earlier, to execute a shakedown cruise in the canoe with its tiny motor, thereby violating the two most reliable, if homely, words of advice I’ve ever received, these from an Ozark cousin: Assume nothing. The bank down to the water was slick, but we soon had the canoe afloat, the motor mounted, and we assumed ourselves aboard. On the third pull of the starter rope, the new engine turned over, on the fourth it fired, and we waved to the Photographer who would haul
Nikawa
to the head of navigable Allegheny water.

The air was nippy but windless, and the river ran clear, visibility to about four feet, a good thing because the bottom was chock-a-block with rocks and boulders, although most of them were rounded and not likely to shear open an aluminum canoe, another fortunate circumstance since we immediately began cracking the propeller and motor stem over them, hard hits that kicked the engine nearly out of the water. Each time, I cut power fast and examined the plastic prop with trepidation, but we had nothing more than scrapes, and we quickly learned to float into the rock gardens and take up our paddles. At first, Pilotis would plunge one to measure the water from the bow but soon became proficient at
seeing
shallowness: like an old river leadsman, Matey cast out a glance instead of a weighted line and called the depth in feet, not fathoms, but later took simply to holding up fingers: when I saw only two digits I shut off the motor. Even so, the current and overcast made the dark bottom difficult to read, and we whacked the prop again and again, but it withstood the stones. I’ve always believed that two-cycle engines—lawnmowers, chainsaws, outboards—exist primarily to keep humankind from loving internal—infernal—combustion any more than we do. Those jerks on a starter rope are there to vex us into remembering we were never meant to use any tool requiring a spark plug. Yet each time, our baby motor started with a single pull, a dozen or more yanks every hour.

For some miles I gave myself a refresher course in reading currents, riffles, and changes in water color, and our descent slowly became easier as I began to understand the particularities of the Allegheny chutes and channels. Helped along by current and intermittent paddles and motor, we were doing about six miles an hour, a progress that relieved me of misinformation I’d heard about the northern end of the Allegheny.
Rule of the River Road:
A section within five miles of an informant’s home is always passable, but ten miles farther, forget it. We had good canoeing, made better because I’d long wanted—an impossibility if one begins from an ocean—to start our voyage by letting a river itself take us downstream, pull us by its own native force into the country. Now, at last, we and the river were of one mind, both of us in quest of the Father of Waters. As I felt our lovely drift atop the Allegheny floating us in the right direction with few radical twists, carrying us on its back toward the Mississippi, I sat easily in the stern in full belief that we could reach the Ohio by water.

Given our fore-and-aft positions and the off-and-on noise of the motor, talking was difficult, so we watched the bankside theater and fell into musings, another river gift. Even though U.S. 62 follows the Allegheny closely on the east shore for many miles, the highway was rarely visible, and despite numerous and often shabby “fishing" cottages, we had a world to ourselves. Wooded hills cradled the narrow river, with interruptions only from the merge of small runs and by slender islands splitting the channel. All the way to Tidioute, sixteen miles, we passed under not a single bridge, and—never mind the dumpy houses alternating from bank to bank as the river terrace shifted east to west—we could almost believe ourselves slipping down through some eighteenth-century morning. The way was virtually free of debris and flotsam, a ditched washing machine the lone piece of junk, and the sky held steady, the pools slowly became slightly deeper—slightly was all we needed—and we had to paddle less and less.

Until now, we’d known few hours permitting idle reflection. For years I’ve been given to culinary dreaming whenever my travel slows or when I need occasional breaks from observing; that day I fell into remembrance of my perpetual hunt across America for genuine soda fountains once abundant but now as imperiled as a Topeka shiner. A friend had recently given me a small volume first published in 1863,
American Soda Book of Receipts and Suggestions
, that I pick up as the devout do a missal. Among the suggestions: “Don’t use too much syrup; it makes a sickening drink,” which I weigh against, “Remember that women like a little more syrup and three times as much foam and froth as men like.” Among the receipts is this one:

Ammonia Cocktail

I was trying to recall the admixture for that peculiar refresher called a phroso when we floated around a broad westerly bend and came upon tiny Tidioute (rhymes with “city boot”), the birthplace of Standard Oil, the ancestor of several of the largest corporations in America. Over the ridge lay the valley where the American oil industry began when “Colonel” Edwin Drake, a railroad conductor too debilitated to stand upright in the swaying aisles of a train, arrived in 1859 to explore black ooze leaking into Oil Creek, stuff then used mostly as a patent medicine. Claimed one advertisement:

KIER’S GENUINE PETROLEUM! Or ROCK OIL!

A natural remedy possessing wonderful curative powers
in diseases of the
Chest, Windpipe and Lungs;
Also for the Care of
Diarrhea, Cholera, Piles, Rheumatism, Gout,
Asthma, Bronchitis, Scrofula or King’s Evil;
Burns and Scalds, Neuralgia, Tetter, Ringworm,
Obstinate Eruptions of the Skin,
Blotches and Pimples on the Face,
Biles, Deafness,
Chronic Sore Eyes, Erysipelas!

Five years later, a ne’er-do-well actor came into the valley to establish the Dramatic Oil Company, but he ruined his well by trying to increase its output, and a few months later John Wilkes Booth went off to ruin other things.

On the second terrace of Tidioute stood a clapboard hotel with a two-storey porch giving a historic view of the Allegheny. That Sunday it was closed, so we walked down to an ordinary place where I told Pilotis about my encounter in the hotel restaurant a year before when I’d come through by road to reconnoiter our route. In had walked an old fellow, pale as if he’d been partially erased, and ordered a sandwich. He looked so forlorn I spoke to him and bought him a mug of beer. He told me, “My wife was ten years younger than me, but she died last year.” I commiserated, said I knew about losing wives, and he said cryptically, “A sharp onion-knife leaves a dry eye. No, I don’t miss her so much. What I miss is my butt. I’ve got no butt anymore. It’s like it fell off somewheres along the line. You get old and your butt disappears. Now, you take my balls, they’re bigger than ever, hanging like a champion bull. It’s Mother Nature’s trick. It’s all backwards. These days, what do I need them things for? What I need is my butt. That’s what I do now—sit, just sit.”

When we returned to the Allegheny, the glum sky remained such that every dry hour seemed like deliverance. The river carried us again into forested slopes for long and rather straight runs, and islands created chutes where we guessed out the deepest water, the through lanes. To the west, the hills began dropping, their far sides opening to agriculture and small oil fields we knew were there only from the map.

We passed a settlement called Trunkeyville, just down the road from Fagundus Corners. Pennsylvania, of course, has the most famous naughty town-name in America—Intercourse, a little south of Blue Ball—although for raciness I prefer Shy Beaver, Bareville, Desire, Tally Ho, or Mount Joy; and there are those renowned nonesuches Punxsutawney, Shickshinny, and Bird-in-Hand. But the toponyms I really like here are of another sort, partly because Pennsylvanians have sometimes acted as if there were a shortage of good and distinctive names. For their foremost university town the best they could come up with was State College, and for two other seats of higher learning they merely, and confusingly, appropriated nomenclature better left farther west—Indiana and California; they may have, however, gone too far into eccentricity, given it’s an ivory tower, when they named one not too distant from our route Slippery Rock. Pennsylvanians have three Centervilles and eighteen other Center-somethings; there are four dozen towns with the key descriptive word of West, and three dozen beginning with New; and they must hold the national record for places suffixed with -burg and -ville, including one named, long before anyone had ever heard of a franchise burger, McVille. Citizens of one village just gave up and called it Hometown, and another community, in a fit of literalness, labeled theirs Factoryville, and yet another settlement apparently seeking the most perennially accurate name ever thought of, Airville. Perhaps erring too far on the side of plain humility are Rock, Paint, and Transfer.

It’s this flatness of imagination that makes me love other Pennsylvania town names. Take those that seem to come from some lost list of the Seven Cardinal Virtues of Commerce: Frugality, Prosperity, Economy, Industry, Enterprise, Energy, Progress. Or those from residents who couldn’t quite remember either the Boy or Girl Scout laws: Brave, Effort, Endeavor, Fairchance, Rough and Ready, Good Intent, Patience. Or those villages in need of the Junior Chamber of Commerce guys: Drab, Drifting, Distant, Drain Lick, Grimville, Leechburg, Scalp Level, Waddle, Cyclone, Panic, Fear Not, Little Hope. Couldn’t they learn something from Lofty or Starlight or Acmetonia or Wampum? I admire the logic of putting in opposite corners of the state, like boxers in a ring, Drinker and Dry Tavern, or keeping Virginville well away from Hooker. But the places here I like most are the loony ones, those that make you ask, “What in God’s name were they thinking of?” Moosic, Blawnox, Nanty Glo, Orbisonia, Porkey, Mundorf, Equinunk, Coupon, Loyalsock, Paxtang, Wapwallopen, Turnip Hole, Shunk. And, of course, old Zelienople, once the “Chicken Dinner Capital of Western Pennsylvania.”

That I had the quietude to look at the map and realize just over the west ridge lay Walkchalk and Whiskerville suggests our gentle descent of the Allegheny—a toponym, by the way, that led the New-York Historical Society in 1845 to advocate changing the name of the United States to the Republic of Allegania, mountains which “bind the country together.” A committee of eminent men cited Washington Irving: